Michael Davidow's Blog: The Henry Bell Project - Posts Tagged "advertising"
Mad Man
“That doesn’t sound like you talking. That’s not Yale, and that’s not Mad Ave. That sounds like Walton talking.”
The first thing many people ask me, when they learn about SPLIT THIRTY, is whether I watch the AMC television show, Mad Men. I tell them honestly that I never have. I wrote the first draft of SPLIT THIRTY years before Mad Men existed. It was actually being represented by a literary agent when AMC made its first splash. I recall asking him if this new television show would help or hurt my prospects. He never answered me. Then he quit. And I put this story aside for a long time, before taking it out to finish.
In those years, too, I stayed away from that program. It irked me, that another writer had succeeded with an idea so similar to mine. I also did not want to be influenced by someone else's vision.
Since starting to market SPLIT THIRTY, though, I’ve become aware of how far Mad Men has gone, and how many people like it. I’ve also seen that some overlap between my work and their work is almost impossible to avoid. We’re looking at adjoining eras, after all, and the same industry. I’ve learned that its writers have made references to Nixon, Rockefeller, Antonioni, and more too, I’m sure.
Thankfully, it was the ’68 campaign that rocked Madison Avenue the most; Nixon’s ad-men being the subject of Joe McGinness’s famous book, The Selling of the President 1968. So maybe they’ll stop before they hit ’72.
And rest assured, in the meantime, the only television show based on advertising that matters to Henry Bell is Bewitched -- because Pooch has a thing for Elizabeth Montgomery.
The first thing many people ask me, when they learn about SPLIT THIRTY, is whether I watch the AMC television show, Mad Men. I tell them honestly that I never have. I wrote the first draft of SPLIT THIRTY years before Mad Men existed. It was actually being represented by a literary agent when AMC made its first splash. I recall asking him if this new television show would help or hurt my prospects. He never answered me. Then he quit. And I put this story aside for a long time, before taking it out to finish.
In those years, too, I stayed away from that program. It irked me, that another writer had succeeded with an idea so similar to mine. I also did not want to be influenced by someone else's vision.
Since starting to market SPLIT THIRTY, though, I’ve become aware of how far Mad Men has gone, and how many people like it. I’ve also seen that some overlap between my work and their work is almost impossible to avoid. We’re looking at adjoining eras, after all, and the same industry. I’ve learned that its writers have made references to Nixon, Rockefeller, Antonioni, and more too, I’m sure.
Thankfully, it was the ’68 campaign that rocked Madison Avenue the most; Nixon’s ad-men being the subject of Joe McGinness’s famous book, The Selling of the President 1968. So maybe they’ll stop before they hit ’72.
And rest assured, in the meantime, the only television show based on advertising that matters to Henry Bell is Bewitched -- because Pooch has a thing for Elizabeth Montgomery.
